Real user monitoring (RUM) is a method used to measure the end user experience in application performance management. It also can be called end user monitoring, or end user experience monitoring. Real user monitoring provides visibility into the user experience of a website or app by passively collecting and analyzing timing, errors and dimensional information on end users in real time. Real user monitoring helps developers understand how their code impacts page performance, user experience and other performance issues.
Real user monitoring offers a comprehensive view into customer experience versus simple uptime/downtime monitoring, which only measures availability. For example, an e-commerce website’s home page might be available, but the page may deliver content or images slowly. It may also be slow to process a user’s click or keystroke, which may result in abandonment. Real user monitoring captures the customer’s experience after the web server has sent the initial HTML document. This information is valuable because 80-90% of end user wait time is experienced not on the backend, but on the client-side, in the web browser.
RUM is an increasingly important tool for understanding and optimizing user experience, alerting administrators to issues and ultimately achieving business objectives. In the following sections, we’ll look at how real user monitoring works, why it’s important, and how you can implement it in your business.
What Is Real User Monitoring: Contents
What is application performance monitoring?
Why is digital experience monitoring important?
How does synthetic monitoring work?
How does real user monitoring work?
How do I get started with real user monitoring?
What are some best practices for real user monitoring?
The Bottom Line: Real user monitoring makes all the difference in customer experience
Application performance monitoring (APM) is a method for ensuring apps and websites are operating smoothly and efficiently. APM tools monitor the performance and availability of apps and alert IT teams to potential service disruptions. These tools include several monitoring solutions:
In modern DevOps environments, APM enables DevOps teams to find bottlenecks quickly and more easily troubleshoot and isolate application problems, making it an integral part of the software development process.
How Real User Monitoring fits into APM
Digital experience monitoring (DEM), which encompasses both real user monitoring and synthetic monitoring, is important because it allows an organization to measure, improve and optimize user experience and page performance. Studies have proven that better-performing sites generally see increases in revenue, conversion and user engagement.
Most organizations understand that they must constantly strive to improve their app experience, but they struggle with execution. And waiting until there’s a problem to improve an app’s user experience often comes at a significant cost. In one study, 90% of users reported they stopped using an app because of poor performance. Rather than waiting to learn about web application issues directly from end users, end user monitoring allows organizations to proactively understand their app’s performance by monitoring user interactions and transactions with the app.
Both real user monitoring and synthetic monitoring have advantages and limitations. Synthetic monitoring’s use of behavioral scripts — rather than actual users — makes it well-suited for finding and fixing potential problems before they impact users. But the downside of synthetic monitoring is that it’s only an approximation of what a real user sees and does in the app and therefore can’t account for all real-world experiences. Real user monitoring, on the other hand, shows exactly how human users experience apps and services — but you have to wait for at least one user to encounter problems before you can address them.
Because of these differences, synthetic monitoring may be most effective for monitoring apps and websites in pre-production in order to catch problems and establish baseline performance before they go live. Once they go live, real user monitoring can then be used to provide visibility into how the websites and apps are impacting actual users.
Synthetic monitoring simulates user transactions by using behavioral scripts that emulate user flows and measure availability, functionality and performance for critical endpoints or across the entire user journey. Because this technique stages and directs an artificial user experience, it’s classified as active monitoring, whereas real user monitoring is considered passive monitoring. In practice, synthetic monitoring works like this: administrators (likely teams responsible for SLA uptime) define several checkpoints and select performance metrics. A robot client follows the predefined user journey through the app, simulating transactions that mimic human behavior, and sending information back on a page’s availability (did the URL respond?), functionality (did all the buttons work?), and performance (how fast were page resources loaded?). Typically, teams set up alerts to notify them of outages for critical service endpoints, which can trigger their incident response.
The information that synthetic monitoring collects can help answer a variety of questions, from basic uptime (is the website up?) to performance (how fast is the site right now?) and even ongoing code improvement (did our recent release improve user experience?).
Synthetic monitoring has several unique advantages, helping teams to:
While synthetic monitoring is a useful method for understanding how users experience a website or app, it’s impossible to simulate every real-world scenario. Therefore, real user monitoring is essential to understanding the experience of your web application for all users in the field.
Real user monitoring collects an app’s or website’s performance metrics directly from the end user's browser via a RUM tool. Typically, the real user monitoring process works by adding a snippet of JavaScript into the header of a web page. Once you implement real user monitoring you can answer some key questions about your website or app’s user experience, such as how long pages are taking to load, or how long the server takes to send the initial HTML file. But you can also gain insights into larger trends, such as:
Real user monitoring tools gather a lot of data from a large volume of users, so they usually include data visualizations like charts and graphs to make information and insights easier to grasp. Dashboards provide intuitive visualizations of metrics such as page load times and top pages. You can also dive into individual user sessions to get to the root cause of why a particular digital journey was subpar and drill down into ways to improve it.
Following a few best practices can help you get the most from real user monitoring:
Real user monitoring requires the use of a third-party solution to prepare your pages to track, collect and analyze user data, then compile and produce actionable reports. There are myriad real user monitoring tools to choose from, so ask yourself these questions when considering the tools:
Your customers expect an optimal experience every time they use your service. Slow or incomplete page loads, transaction errors, and other problems aren’t just annoying, they can taint the user’s experience of your business for good. Real user monitoring can uncover the impediments to a great customer experience like no other tool, allowing you to keep your site or app at peak performance — and keep customers coming back again and again.